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Nokia Siemens outsources some R&D to IBM Nokia Siemens Networks will hand over parts of some research and development teams to IBM, unloading some of its workforce while continuing to gain the benefit of their expertise, the companies said Monday. Tech giants chart research goals Power consumption, parallelism, and the rapidly-expanding world of mobile communications are among the leading areas of research and development currently being investigated within some of the IT world's largest companies.  September 26, 2:53 p.m. PDT Brocade sets up R&D center in India Brocade Communications Systems has established a research and development (R&D) center in Bangalore, India. The new center will focus on the development of infrastructure software, and software for storage applications, and data mobility applications, Zahid Hussain, Brocade's vice president of engineering, said Wednesday. August 1, 8:54 a.m. PDT IT immigration: Thoughtful debate amid the flames Wow. My column last week proposing to grant citizenship to immigrant developers, "Open the floodgates to IT immigration," generated a torrent of comments from readers (83 and counting). Many were emotional, some were flames, almost all were opinionated, and the vast majority was – drumroll – thoughtful and rational, and they made me sympathetic to their point of view. As one person wrote, "there's a lot of layers to this onion," and our readers peeled them all back. Thanks, everybody, for taking the time. July 19, 3:00 a.m. PDT 2007 InfoWorld CTO 25: John Alber In recent years, corporate lawyers long accustomed to charging an hourly rate have found themselves facing client demands for discounts, shared risk deals (where fees are based on results), and flat rates. “Clients now treat law firms as they do other suppliers: They make us respond to RFPs, apply rate pressure, and make us compete,” says John Alber, technology partner (the legal industry’s term for a CTO) at the global law firm Bryan Cave. June 6, 3:00 a.m. PDT Yahoo opens access to ad system APIs Yahoo is making APIs available for external developers so that they can build tools and applications for its new Panama search advertising platform. June 4, 11:20 a.m. PDT HP Services led by the other John McCain Hewlett-Packard Co.'s Services division deploys some 70,000 people, half the company's total work force, to advise on IT management and to maintain HP and other equipment in data centers for customers. John McCain is the HP senior vice president charged with running that division, which contributes 17 percent of HP's revenue, US$15.6 billion in fiscal 2006, and 20 percent of its operating profit. April 19, 10:09 a.m. PDT Iona adds repository for SOAs Iona Technologies Inc. is broadening its suite of Artix infrastructure software with a new tool announced Monday for managing software services in an SOA environment. March 26, 4:57 a.m. PST How I started my IT career I’ve worked in IT for so long that whole segments of my career tend to blur out. But I can tell you exactly when it started. March 20, 3:00 a.m. PST Caught in an endless loop of coding and recoding Every development shop has issues. March 6, 3:00 a.m. PST People, not technology, now at center of emerging tech The DEMO 07 conference, the annual gathering of the haves and the have-nots -- venture capitalists with millions of dollars to invest and startups hungering for first-, second-, and third-round infusions of cash -- got off to a big start with 16 companies presenting in the first morning session. January 31, 1:29 p.m. PST When will companies stop producing awful software? Many years ago I had a job working for “Acme Codeworks,” a small mainframe software vendor. One day my boss asked me to evaluate a backup app as a candidate for acquisition. I installed it, and the mainframe promptly crashed. Off to the computer room I went, where my colleagues and I spent several hours bringing the system back up. (This fact should provide an approximate date for this story; these days, if an OS crashes, it usually restarts itself while you’re waiting for the elevator.) January 23, 3:00 a.m. PST Tabblo’s approach to rich Internet apps If you want a peek into the future of RIAs (rich Internet applications), take a look at Tabblo (tabblo.com). The model that Tabblo has set into motion for photographers -- both amateur and professional -- will soon be adopted by enterprise IT to empower its user base. January 16, 3:00 a.m. PST Clueless manager duped by product demo My IT career began just as the Internet boom was ramping up. Not surprisingly, when my company's management team noticed our competitors moving onto the Web, it decided we needed to be there too. After several meetings, all the various divisions and departments came to an agreement on a simple promotional site. A couple of weeks later, we were online. Everything would have been peachy, except for "Stanley." January 2, 3:00 a.m. PST Intel speeds up introduction of quad-core chip Intel Corp. says it has rushed introduction of a new quad-core chip originally scheduled for next year to Monday to meet demand from server manufacturers for the processor. December 12, 11:44 a.m. PST How to (almost) get an IT job in France I work for a small consulting company I’ll call “FactorE.” We specialize in designing computer control systems to monitor and regulate factory operations. Last year we signed a new client, a European metallurgical consortium that was building twin factories -- one in Toulouse, in the south of France, and one in the desert outside Las Vegas. Along with a French colleague, “Jean-Luc,” I was assigned to implement all needed computer systems. December 12, 3:00 a.m. PST India's Satyam looks to Malaysia for extra staff Indian outsourcer Satyam Computer Services is setting up a 2,000-seat software development facility in Malaysia that will service its customers worldwide. December 7, 7:52 a.m. PST Microsoft technical documents back on track in antitrust case A U.S. district judge on Tuesday praised the schedule set up in a revamped technical documentation project that's part of the 4-year-old antitrust settlement between Microsoft Corp. and the U.S. government. December 5, 12:18 p.m. PST Wanted: megatrend technology innovators From where will the next disruptive innovations in IT come? And who’s out there looking at the big picture, incubating the IT solutions we’ll need 20, 30, or even 50 years from now? December 1, 3:00 a.m. PST Winning IT contracts the military way To tell the following story, I must change a few names to keep out of trouble. So, instead of the Army, the Navy, and the Air Force, it will be Force Red, Force Blue, and Force Green — but not necessarily in that order. OK, then… November 28, 3:00 a.m. PST Ripple effect of court cases means new rules for IT If you work for a large corporation -- in any department, not just IT -- you’re probably aware of the new FRCP (Federal Rules of Civil Procedure) that go into effect on Dec. 1. The new FRCP outlines the “how, what, and wherefore” of electronic document retention and disposal. But you may not be familiar with the two cases that made the changes necessary. November 17, 3:00 a.m. PST Will IT certifications pay off in the long run? A few weeks ago, I wrote about how the U.S. is losing momentum in IT certifications growth, compared with emerging markets such as Eastern Europe, India, and Latin America. November 17, 3:00 a.m. PST 2006 InfoWorld 100 Awards: Computing/Tech ArvatoMobile www.arvato-mobile.com Virtual Server Infrastructure Project Lead: Lukas Lösche, Director of IT Operations Project Description: Runs about 600 virtual servers, both Linux and Windows, comprising nearly the entire infrastructure for development and testing, internal apps, and business-critical applications, including content processing, licensing, distribution, royalty management, and user support. Even the company's Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL database clusters, and Business Objects reporting servers run on Virtuozzo. Behind the servers, several hundred terabytes of disc and tape storage are virtualized, using grid storage components, into a single file system namespace. November 13, 3:00 a.m. PST Capital One revitalizes service delivery systems A decade of rapid growth has a way of making any cutting-edge enterprise feel outdated. But Rob Alexander, executive vice president of Capital One Financial, and his team rose to the challenge. November 13, 3:00 a.m. PST Wave of spin-offs puts Keane to the test Think you have a lot on your plate? Consider Bob Atwell, senior vice president of Keane, the $1 billion IT services provider. November 13, 3:00 a.m. PST Nationwide ensures unified view into financials With 30,000 employees and many semiautonomous divisions across geographic and line-of-business boundaries -- including several acquired but only partially digested business units -- Nationwide Insurance found it increasingly hard for its central financial and executive team to get a comprehensive, up-to-date view of the company. November 13, 3:00 a.m. PST Goodwill’s Support 2020 widens circle of outreach What does it take to run one of the nation’s oldest and largest social services agencies? Ask the IT team at Goodwill Industries-Suncoast in St. Petersburg, Fla., and they’ll proudly tell you about Support 2020. The name alone suggests a clear vision of the road ahead. November 13, 3:00 a.m. PST 2006 InfoWorld 100 Awards: Education Open Source Lab at Oregon State University www.osuosl.org 24/7 On-Demand Systems and Applications Availability Project Lead: Corey Shields, Infrastructure Manager Project Description: Provides free hosting for the Linux Kernel Project, the Apache Software Foundation, Debian Linux, Gentoo Linux, OpenOffice.org, KDE, Mozilla, and Drupal. The lab's size has more than tripled in the past 18 months and hosts 130 servers. The servers run a variety of Linux distributions, mostly Gentoo and Debian. They host a range of Apache-based Web services, source control systems, content management systems, wikis, and many underlying databases, mostly MySQL. The project leverages Splunk, Xen, and Cfengine combined with Revision Control. November 13, 3:00 a.m. PST Bezos can't get enough muck Expect Amazon.com Inc. to continue building its suite of hosted IT infrastructure services for developers, as the planet's best known online retailer pushes into this new business, the company's Chief Executive Officer Jeff Bezos said Wednesday. November 8, 11:52 a.m. PST Cast your vote for IT's future Dear reader: Ask not what IT can do for you, ask what you can do for IT. With the crucial midterm congressional elections just a couple of weeks away (not to mention a bevy of state and local contests), it’s time to issue my first annual From the Analysts political endorsements. October 20, 3:00 a.m. PDT Which country boasts the biggest IT brains? Back in the 1800s, many educated people became practitioners of the bogus, bigoted “science” of phrenology, which used skull measurements to determine the capabilities of one’s brain and the quality of one’s character. You may remember — if you were born in the 1800s or watch a lot of Discovery Channel — seeing those phrenological drawings of folks’ skulls divided into little compartments that specified the function of the parts of the brain within. October 13, 3:00 a.m. PDT An IT soap opera: Passion, programming don't mix Not all soap operas are on TV. case in point: I used to work as a programmer for a midsize trucking company I’ll call “US Freightline,” with yards and offices scattered around the Chicago area. Not only was “Joe,” the IT manager (and my boss) a good guy, but, as it happens, his wife “Jennifer” and I were old college pals. October 3, 3:00 a.m. PDT Intel invests $40M in Chinese software vendor Intel plans to invest $40 million in Neusoft Group as part of a deal that will see the Chinese software vendor optimize its products for Intel microprocessors. September 26, 4:30 a.m. PDT How to bungle a software upgrade Ten years ago, I was the IT manager at a successful software company whose main product was aimed at large insurance companies. It was a DOS app that read records from large data files, did a little processing, and passed the results to other apps downstream. It wasn’t particularly pretty, but it was accurate -- and it was fast! It worked in batch mode, processing thousands of records per minute, which was a critical feature, considering how many records our clients needed to manage each day. September 26, 3:00 a.m. PDT Black Duck spruces up UI in software compliance system Black Duck Software on Monday is releasing an upgrade to its protexIP system for software compliance management featuring an AJAX-based (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) user interface to increase responsiveness. A new software development kit also is a highlight. September 24, 9:01 p.m. PDT Skipping the Super Bowl to debug the system A few years ago I signed up with a large, multinational lingerie retailer I’ll call “LaceLand,” to oversee its migration to a new inventory system. I was joining a team of three “computer migration specialists,” all of whom had been hired by “Edmund,” the company’s IT director. As far as I could tell, these guys’ real specialty was avoiding work. They seemed to spend most of their time yakking about sports. September 19, 3:00 a.m. PDT Targeted training keeps IT workers sharp Dimension Data’s IP telephony services were growing at more than 100 percent per year. But instead of hiring the 30 to 40 new IPT engineers it needed to keep up with demand, the $2.7 billion IT solutions provider decided to invest in training programs to get more out of the people it already had. September 18, 3:00 a.m. PDT Become your own IT career coach “Be your own brand.”It’s good advice. It would be even better if it helped clarify how to go about it. But brand management is the province of marketing, not IT. So other than adding a “New and improved!” sticker to your résumé, you might not be sure about the fine points. September 18, 3:00 a.m. PDT Nailing the interview: A headhunter tells how You can ace your job interview by remembering one simple fact: The company interviewing you isn’t in business to hire people. It’s in business to produce profit. That’s why all those interview books are wrong: Success in a job interview is not about answering questions. It’s about managing your meeting so that you can show how you will deliver profit. Unless you get that, you have no business in the job interview to begin with -- in Silicon Valley or any other tech mecca. September 18, 3:00 a.m. PDT Strategic IT talent: Offshoring is not the answer It’s been a common refrain for years, growing to a chorus in the election year of 2004. As technology workers rail against the exporting of IT jobs to India, China, the Philippines, and beyond, their would-be bosses bemoan an ever-shrinking IT talent pool. September 18, 3:00 a.m. PDT How to get a job at Google Attention, job hunters. Google is hiring. In fact, it’s having a problem finding enough people with the right talent and skills to fill all its openings. September 18, 3:00 a.m. PDT Executive order: Attract and retain top IT talent It was a sweltering June night at the Middle East Club in Cambridge, Mass., and Joe Turner & the Seven Levels were about to take the stage. But this was no ordinary battle of the bands, and the alt-rockers were vying to win more than merely the crowd’s affection. September 18, 3:00 a.m. PDT Standing tall among giants I made a quick stop at the Gartner Financial Services Technology conference in Boston last week, en route to a long weekend in Rhode Island, where I consumed more lobster than previously thought physically possible — we don’t get lobster on the West Coast, and don’t even get me started about the clam chowder! September 15, 3:00 a.m. PDT Improving IT through mentoring I always knew this day would come. I’d be talking to somebody and they’d say: “Hey, did you hear, Maynard Ferguson died this week?” I knew I’d go home, crack open a beer, crank up the stereo, and retreat into the pure raw energy of a jazz trumpet legend, one of my lifelong heroes. September 8, 3:00 a.m. PDT Apple ensemble hits the right note My city’s symphony orchestra is marvelous. In a lesser setting, any of the orchestra’s musicians would be a marquee soloist, front and center. But as an orchestra, about 100 consummately talented artists become one. The visual spectacle and the sociology of an orchestra is the reason I go to the symphony rather than buy the CD. September 6, 3:00 a.m. PDT Microsoft partners with Satyam in Asia Microsoft and Satyam Computer Services opened two business intelligence software testing and development centers in Asia on Tuesday, hoping to usher in a new era for Chinese financial applications. September 5, 6:09 a.m. PDT The case for altruism The first timeI heard about Wikipedia, I thought, This has no shot. Why would highly qualified people devote their energies to an encyclopedia they couldn’t make a dime on? September 4, 3:00 a.m. PDT Choosing the wrong software The road to new software can follow a strange and convoluted course. I was feeling optimistic as I began a new consulting engagement for a national retailer, as part of a team developing an RFP (request for proposal) for a new HR/Payroll application. True, there were 12 divisions, and each one required a detailed process-flow-and-requirements definition. But having met with the key users in each area, I was confident we’d be able to sort everything out. In addition, we enjoyed the support of the VP in charge of HR, which helped us avoid many of the stalling tactics that typically occur during such efforts. August 29, 3:00 a.m. PDT Lawsuit alleges programmer visa abuses A group representing IT workers has begun filing about 380 lawsuits against U.S. companies who advertise, in violation of the U.S. law, that they prefer to hire foreign workers with H-1B temporary work visas. August 18, 8:36 a.m. PDT Gartner’s high-tech hype radar Gartner, the 900-pound gorilla of IT research firms, has something to say about seemingly everything. With 1,200 analysts and 3,700 associates, Gartner pretty much covers the waterfront. But in sifting through its carefully qualified predictions and oh-so-nuanced magic quadrants, my eyes usually glaze over. August 18, 3:00 a.m. PDT Getting a raw deal on a green card I’ve been in the U.S. as an H-1B worker for almost six years now, and while I’ve managed plenty of successful projects, one job I’ve never managed to complete is landing a green card. August 15, 3:00 a.m. PDT Does “built to last” apply to IT? Over the weekend, I bought an amazing antique chair: a fancy wooden office swivel chair in practically mint condition, including all its original cast-iron hardware. Although probably made between 1900 and 1915 (the patent date is 1897), it’s remarkably modern, with fully adjustable height, tilt, and back support, like the best Aeron chairs of today (well, its wooden surfaces are a tad stiffer). With any luck, it will last another 100 years and be just as functional. August 11, 3:00 a.m. PDT IT contractors: Read your contracts! My first IT job out of college was working for a cable TV outfit, where I was surprised to discover that virtually all development of new apps was routinely assigned to an outside consultancy. Full-time IT employees like me did maintenance. Period. I became friendly with a couple of the contract guys and discovered they were billing at rates several times higher than what any of us were getting paid. August 3, 3:00 a.m. PDT Google to host repository for open-source projects Google is offering to host open source software development projects in a move that has been met with mixed reaction from the developer community online. July 28, 4:53 a.m. PDT Programming in Paris … without a work permit Snow was melting in Chicago as I finished a consulting job customizing software for a local hospital. So when I heard that my agency was working with a French company, “ITM,” on a similar project in Paris, I begged for the assignment. I could practically see myself sitting in a café on the Champs-Elysées, typing code into my notebook as spring turned into summer. July 25, 3:00 a.m. PDT Web site disasters made easy In 1997, I was working in the IT department at a midsize consumer products company in the San Francisco Bay Area. My job was mainly to keep the network up; the company had no Web presence. But as our competitors ate more and more of our lunch, it gradually dawned on management that we ought to be selling online. So I built a LAMP (Linux, Apache, and Perl/Python/PHP) sales portal that handled online ordering and a corporate Web site. It generated revenue from the outset. July 18, 3:00 a.m. PDT Broaden your options: Don’t fear native code I have prepared an account of the history of .Net and Java that’s intended to balance more fanciful post-mortem accounts (of .Net and Java, not of me). It reads thus: Sun created Java to cash in on the success of Visual Basic and to convince development managers that C++ coders are all slobbering toddlers playing with nail guns. Sun did grant C++ dispensation for “performance-sensitive applications,” a category that covered most of Sun’s software catalog. Microsoft created .Net to keep Java from gaining traction and to put that cross-platform nonsense to rest once and for all. One OS, one run-time, many languages was the best way to go. C#, the Microsoft alternative to Java with the honesty to use “C” in its name, still kept the pencils and paper clips away from the inmates, except, of course, for those developers working on performance-sensitive applications, a category that covered most of Microsoft’s software catalog. July 12, 3:00 a.m. PDT Devilish details dash software project It's been almost 10 years now since I went to work for a large, specialized printing company. My job was to keep all the computers working and to make sure they could interface with an arcane array of high-res output devices. June 27, 3:00 a.m. PDT InfoWorld CTO 25: Roland Whitehead When your IT department has successfully accommodated five M&As in the past four years, you must be doing something right. For Roland Whitehead, global director of IT for the elite auction house Bonhams, the secret lies in custom development, which he considers a key component of Bonhams’ dramatic growth. June 5, 3:00 a.m. PDT InfoWorld CTO 25: Dan Canzano To Dan Canzano, there’s more to being the vice president of IT at Paychex than understanding technology. “I am not a technologist per se,” he says. “I have a master’s in business and I’ve been smart enough to surround myself with very capable and smart technical people.” June 5, 3:00 a.m. PDT InfoWorld CTO 25: Bob DeRodes Bob DeRodes used to be a long-snapping center, but he says he missed his shot at the NFL. Instead, he became executive vice president and CIO of The Home Depot. June 5, 3:00 a.m. PDT CollabNet may open source more of its software CollabNet may put some of its core software under an open-source license, or under a dual licensing model, to promote its adoption by users, an executive said. May 30, 4:54 a.m. PDT HP set to unveil IT shared services offering Leveraging its intimate knowledge of enterprise infrastructure, Hewlett-Packard will announce on Wednesday, IT Shared Services Portfolio, a two-part offering that industry analysts say will raise the level of its consulting services. May 23, 11:45 a.m. PDT Upstart startups Startups aren’t typical fodder for InfoWorld stories. For that matter, we don’t devote all that much ink to tech companies in general, preferring to focus on technologies, products, and strategies that help IT do what it needs to do. May 15, 3:00 a.m. PDT Technology workers are the future “How much love are we giving them?” I overheard this the other day from a woman -- undoubtedly a sales exec -- on her cell phone on the escalator at San Francisco’s Moscone Center. Don’t ask why, but I’d taken a flyer and spent two hours at ad:tech, an interactive marketing conference that has little to do with enterprise IT. Because there’s no real technology differentiation in interactive marketing, from what I can tell, the Internet advertising business is all about the love. May 5, 3:00 a.m. PDT GCI sets up shop in Brazil, China IT services company Global Consultants Inc. (GCI) plans to set up shop in Brazil and China to service the operations in those countries of its multinational customers, according to an executive of the company. May 4, 5:39 a.m. PDT Borland to shed 300 staff Borland Software is cutting staff by approximately 300 as part of an internal restructuring, the company said on Wednesday. May 3, 1:00 p.m. PDT Dumping your technology vendor? Let reason prevail 5 GOOD REASONS TO FIRE YOUR VENDOR 1. It can’t provide the service you need When it takes three phone calls to get a response or three repairs to get something working right, it’s time to get out, says the Uptime Group’s Patty Laushman. “If you’re paying the vendor, they should know what they’re doing. You shouldn’t have to call three times to fix the same problem.” April 27, 3:00 a.m. PDT Tips on how to divorce your technology vendor Sure, hooking up with a new service provider is all cigars and handshakes at first. Promises are made and stars glimmer in your eyes as you sign the contract. The future looks bright. April 27, 3:00 a.m. PDT Resources for resolving vendor disputes American Arbitration Association The uber-organization for dispute resolution provides access to more than 8,000 neutral parties who handle all manner of disputes, including commercial ones. The site is packed with FAQs, guidelines, and forms you can submit to commence arbitration proceedings. April 27, 3:00 a.m. PDT Flextronics sells software unit for $900M Flextronics International, one of the world's top contract electronics manufacturers, said Sunday it agreed to sell its software business to an affiliate of buyout firm Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. in a deal valued at $900 million. April 17, 4:03 a.m. PDT eFashion Solutions seeks agility, not do-it-yourself To deliver branded e-commerce sites for customers such as JLO by Jennifer Lopez, Members Only, and OP, eFashion Solutions wanted a platform it could easily customize and enhance, without being chained to custom, homegrown code. Open source was the answer, says Mitch Pirtle, the company’s director of open source initiatives. April 3, 3:00 a.m. PDT SAP plans to triple staff at Shanghai R&D lab With an eye on China's large pool of software developers and growing economic significance, SAP plans to more than triple the staff at its research and development (R&D) facility in Shanghai by 2008, a company spokesman said Monday. March 27, 5:47 a.m. PST Do good work, lose your job I’m a database programmer by trade, but I can write too. Several years ago, a large hardware vendor offered me a handsome salary to oversee documentation for the company’s embedded utilities. I decided if they had the money, I had the time. March 21, 3:00 a.m. PST EclipseCon reflects IDE’s rise as plug-in platform of choice EclipseCon kicks off this week in Santa Clara, Calif., marking the second annual convocation of Eclipse partners and vendors, who will gather to learn about and celebrate alliances, new products, and new directions. March 20, 3:00 a.m. PST Development project becomes "March to Hell" When the project time line is impossible and the requirements keep changing, experienced managers look for the exit March 7, 3:00 a.m. PST Deciphering IT corporate-speak I was senior IT manager at a large health-care organization when the vice president of applications management asked me to create a centralized quality assurance department. At that point, our IT organization consisted of close to 1,500 staffers scattered over eight states, but quality assurance was still being done on a project-by-project basis. Centralizing this operation would bring us badly needed consistency, and (I hoped) would improve customer satisfaction. February 28, 3:00 a.m. PST One bad decision derails payroll system upgrade I came into the tech world with a background in accounting and taxes -- which makes me a very deadline-oriented person. After all, if a company’s taxes and SEC documentation are one day late, it can end up owing many thousands of dollars to the government. This money is not recoverable. If you’re responsible, you will end up definitively unemployed. When a tax or accounting project is filed, it’s done. February 21, 3:00 a.m. PST Krugle unveils a search engine for code I’m just back from the Demo 2006 conference in Phoenix. Demo, for those who don’t know, is a show owned by InfoWorld parent company IDG, and it gives tech startups six minutes to present their technology to an audience of corporate investors and venture capitalists. Of the 68 startups that took the stage this year, two really stood out. February 14, 3:00 a.m. PST The open source answer: An interview with Bruce Snyder How does open source figure into the build-or-buy decision? For an informed perspective, we turned to Bruce Snyder, co-founder and developer for the Geronimo project and a senior architect at LogicBlaze, a provider of open source solutions for SOA and business integration, including ServiceMix ESB and ActiveMQ messaging platform. February 13, 3:00 a.m. PST India's outsourcing industry to grow by 32 percent India's software and services exports are estimated to grow by 32 percent to $23.4 billion in the fiscal year ending March 31, according to data released Thursday by the National Association of Software and Service Companies (NASSCOM). February 9, 6:10 a.m. PST Bringing software development back in-house I’ve written so many columns about offshore outsourcing that I never thought I’d do another. Then I met Mike Fields, the new CEO at CRM vendor Kana Software, and I changed my mind. This time I want to talk about what Fields calls “backshoring.” February 7, 3:00 a.m. PST Team Foundation Server gets ready for liftoff With the upcoming release of its Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation Server, Microsoft will attempt to strengthen its relationship with enterprise developers through a new push toward collaborative development. February 6, 3:00 a.m. PST SAP CEO: India is getting expensive Escalating personnel costs in India -- one of the world's largest markets for off-shore software development services -- have prompted business software vendor SAP to begin looking elsewhere for lower-cost, skilled programmers. January 30, 5:13 a.m. PST The IT worst case scenario survival guide You’re lost in the IT wilderness, starved for funding and thirsting for recognition. As the infrastructure sinks slowly under your feet, alligators crawl out of their corner offices to snap at your heels and marketing weasels begin gnawing at your flesh ... January 30, 3:00 a.m. PST Is standardization helping to drive corporate mergers? It’s mating season again in the corporate world (come to think of it, when is it ever not?). Pixar and Disney are dancing the tango, Verizon and SBC have just gobbled up MCI and AT&T, and Guidant is in the final throes of being torn between two lovers -- Boston Scientific and Johnson & Johnson. January 27, 3:00 a.m. PST Microsoft adds new features to Windows Live Microsoft Corp. this week introduced enhancements to its Windows Live portal (http://live.com), the entry point for users to access its Web-based services. January 26, 3:14 p.m. PST FirstGov.gov revamps search functionality Internet users looking for information at the U.S. government's Web portal will get more complete and relevant results using a new search engine unveiled Tuesday, according to officials with the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA). January 24, 11:54 a.m. PST When code changes lead to unemployment I was working for a small software company when we got the assignment to build an online customer system for an international shipping corporation. It was a major sale for us. I had done a fair amount of the initial coding, and naturally I was excited. There were all kinds financial incentives riding on it -- including a trip to Hawaii for yours truly. January 24, 3:00 a.m. PST Software as a service: Pay as you build, but at what cost? See correction below January 24, 3:00 a.m. PST SpikeSource's Polese cites open source complexities Kim Polese, CEO of open source services provider SpikeSource since 2004, is perhaps one of the better known IT executives. Prior to joining SpikeSource, she became one of the industry's first female chief executives as co-founder, president, and CEO of push technology vendor Marimba, which was acquired by BMC Software in 2004. Earlier, while at Sun Microsystems, Polese was the first product manager for Java. InfoWorld editors Paul Krill and Neil McAllister spoke with Polese last week about a range of topics, including SpikeSource, open source, outsourcing, and Java. January 23, 2:00 p.m. PST Survey: CIOs strive to improve business processes A recent survey of global chief information officers (CIOs) found that using IT to make improvements to a company's business processes is the top priority for them in 2006, according to Gartner Inc. January 23, 11:37 a.m. PST Wall Street Beat: Earnings bring mixed results Earnings season blew in with a vengeance this week, with disappointing fourth-quarter results from industry bellwethers Intel Corp. and IBM Corp. offset by better-than-expected reports from other vendors. January 19, 4:20 p.m. PST An unexpected danger of outsourcing I work at a Fortune 500 company where we use many contract programmers, and one of my jobs is hiring them. Normally, this is a straightforward process. But on one occasion, it went wildly out of control. January 17, 3:00 a.m. PST Oracle to increase staff in India to 10,000 Oracle will increase the number of staff it has in India to 10,000 from 8,600 over the next eight months, the company said Tuesday. January 10, 4:40 a.m. PST EMC beefs up services team with acquisition Storage titan EMC has strengthened its professional services team with the acquisition of Internosis, a specialist in Microsoft systems and applications. January 9, 8:16 a.m. PST 'Pay-per-call' ads a good option for service providers An online ad that yields a phone call: Now that's counterintuitive. After all, isn't the point of such advertising to reduce phone time by directing customers to a Web site? That's true for some businesses, but others--especially service providers--prefer to encourage prospective clients to dial them up. January 3, 3:36 p.m. PST Tech groups press for R&D tax credit extension A research and development tax credit has expired after the U.S. Congress failed to act on an extension before its December holiday break. January 3, 9:40 a.m. PST An IT project without a future A few years back, my associate Paul and I were working as network engineers for a large transportation company when we were assigned to a project supporting a major new intercontinental communications application. Grady and Dennis were the project managers. December 27, 3:00 a.m. PST Spanish bank extends EDS deal valued at $240M Spanish bank La Caixa has extended its agreement with Electronic Data Systems Corp. (EDS) to provide IT and business process outsourcing services for four more years in a deal valued at €200 million (US$240 million). December 21, 3:12 a.m. PST > Application development > Professional services |
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